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My PhD Genealogy

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Re: My PhD Genealogy

#31

Post by throwoutway »

telotortium wrote: post #24
kragen wrote: post #8

I spent some time in 02016 digging through different sorts of academic lineages. It turns out, for example, that you can also trace Leibniz back to Copernicus: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/academic-lineage.html Thrun's page seems to have an error about Leibniz: "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1966, 1967, 1976" It would be nice to be able to trace figures like al-Tusi back to Plato and Imhotep, to know if there really…

I feel that the possibility of tracing academic lineage back to antiquity in the West is very dim, for the same reason that tracing descent from antiquity[0] in Europe has proven impossible - too few records survived. Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s with Guillaume…

I’ve always wondered what things we’ve lost from library fires, hall burnings, church burnings etc. perhaps this is one such example

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#34

Post by xdavidliu »

seydor wrote: post #11

Academia is not that big, is quite incestuous, and such trees or descent are not rare. I think there was a website that listed people's academic family here is one for neuroscience: https://neurotree.org/neurotree/

what do you mean by "incestuous"? I'm having a hard time picturing the tree structure. Like if we keep things simple and assume every person on the tree "asexually spawns" multiple students, where does the "incest" come in?

Maybe one student having more than one advisor? If that's the case, usually it's just a thesis committee or reviewer or something, and not really multiple _main_ advisors

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#36

Post by Syzygies »

dekhn wrote: post #13

He just needs to make a movie with Kevin Bacon and publish with Erdos to round things out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...

Ha! Erdős–Bacon numbers originated in a 2002 Telegraph article by Simon Singh, referenced by Wikipedia as [1]:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121112081753/http://www.telegr...

I came up with this game after realizing I had an Erdős–Bacon number. He credits me, but spun the article to make this sound like a "thing" other people cared about.

I was written out of that Wikipedia page long ago. Very little of what survives on that page stands up to close scrutiny.

Combining these numbers is an obscure amusement, but people take the separate numbers seriously. For Erdős numbers, should one count posthumous papers? My "2" via Persi Diaconis goes to "3" if one doesn't.

The original intent of the Bacon number game was to count actors in fictional speaking roles. My "2" here is from a speaking role in "A Beautiful Mind". The "Oracle of Bacon" replaced this intent with whatever their database could easily report. Appearing as oneself in a documentary on Erdős had the obvious hilarious effect.

One understand these links better by studying IMBD credits. Daniel Kleitman's "2" depends on a "Thanks" credit from "Good Will Hunting", and few of the other low Bacon numbers on the Erdős–Bacon Wikipedia page can be confirmed at all.

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#37

Post by lmpdev »

throwoutway wrote: post #31
telotortium wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the possibility of tracing academic lineage back to antiquity in the West is very dim, for the same reason that tracing descent from antiquity[0] in Europe has proven impossible - too few records survived. Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s with Guillaume…

I’ve always wondered what things we’ve lost from library fires, hall burnings, church burnings etc. perhaps this is one such example

It boggles the mind

The likelihood of a text surviving tends towards zero given enough time

Before antiquity we often only have quoted fragments to look at

The early episodes of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is a pretty good introduction to how little we know about pre-socratic thinkers especially

Surviving corpora can often be only hundreds of characters long

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#38

Post by alfiedotwtf »

bgriirtuh wrote: post #30
anm89 wrote: post #28

Jean-Baptiste Fourier | Joseph Lagrange | Leonhard Euler 1726 | Johann Bernoulli 1694 | Gottfried Leibniz 1666 I was never aware of this connection. Is there some reasons or story behind how all of these geniuses clustered together?

It's hard to succeed in academia if you aren't in a lineage. See Castelvecchi, D. "Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’". Nature 537, 20–21 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.20491 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20491

Same goes with classical piano, and Kung Fu.

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#40

Post by kragen »

lpolovets wrote: post #12

I started browsing https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ after reading this post. Some of the genealogies are wildly impressive. For example: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38586 Bernoulli -> Euler -> Lagrange -> Poisson and Fourier

The Euler -> Lagrange link is sort of dodgy, though. Lagrange was an autodidact. What he got from Euler was Euler's position at court, not a doctorate, though they did collaborate on some research before that.
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